Editorials

Editorial: Playing it Cool on a Hot Topic By BECKY O'MALLEY

Friday July 08, 2005

Mr. Tobey, who appears again today to our right, seems not to know that editors, not writers, always write the headlines. Headlines in this and most papers will always be the choice of the editor—we’re happy to clarify that for him. There’s a simple practical reason for this: headlines have to be adjusted to fit into space available. Also, we do try to write headlines to catch readers’ eyes, and “Landmarks Meeting of June 27th” just isn’t a very catchy title. And if Mr. Tobey did predict that a headline writer might combine the epithets “anarchist” and “suicide bomber” into the concept of “terrorist” in a headline, he should have used less, shall we say, “inflammatory” language in the first place.  

But that’s the simple part. More troubling is the way Tobey’s op-ed distorted the history of the calculated and deliberate attempts to destroy Berkeley’s Landmarks Preservation Ordinance, which has protected its historic resources and its neighborhoods for the last 25 years. I take personal exception to his charge that “the ‘landmarks experts’ on the LPC couldn’t be bothered to produce [their own draft] or even to offer constructive suggestions along the way.” Nothing could be further from the truth. In the years I was on the commission, we produced not one but two full drafts, and offered a host of constructive suggestions, most of which were ignored by the city staff which was supposed to be supporting our work. 

Tobey wasn’t even around for much of the five years this has been going on. The first time I ever saw him was when he started monitoring Landmarks Commission meetings a couple of years ago on behalf of Livable Berkeley, a new pro-development lobbying group. 

A little history lesson: In the first place, changing one short phrase in the existing ordinance would bring it into compliance with the state’s Permit Streamlining Act, which was all the City Council originally wanted. City staff, on their own initiative, chose to weigh down the ordinance language they offered with many more unnecessary changes in order to advance their own pro-growth agenda. That point has been exhaustively documented in these pages by me and many others, so I won’t waste any more of the readers’ time on it.  

The commission spent three long years trying unsuccessfully to clean up a series of inexcusably sloppy drafts, full of embarrassing errors, which were produced by the city attorney’s office and a string of poorly-educated planning department staffers. Next, the commission tried to get the job done by appointing an ad hoc committee of their own members to do it, of which I was one. We worked for several more months on our own time, with the pro-bono services of retired planner John English, to produce a straightforward and error-free draft, which we presented to the commission in December of 2002. But since this was just after a council election, outgoing commissioners were reluctant to adopt it. It took the newly appointed commissioners another year to get up to speed, in a period when the development boom also meant a massive increase in the commission’s workload. At the end of that year, a final draft was passed by the LPC which incorporated many compromises with staff pro-growth advocates. 

Big mistake. This turned out to be the classic error liberals make when they try to compromise. They lead off with concessions, hoping that their opponents will be public-spirited enough to appreciate them and make a few compromises of their own. And then the other side takes the concessions, thank you very much, and still demands everything they originally wanted in addition. That’s the genesis of the Planning Commission’s new draft, which incorporates many objectionable new wrinkles at the behest of the development lobby. The mayor is trying to ram it through before the City Council departs on its long summer vacation. 

Tobey and a couple of well-meaning but naïve liberals (Some of My Best Friends Are….) proposed a few more sacrificial compromises intended to placate the development boosters, but by this time the LPC wasn’t buying, nor did the pro-growthers seem to be placated. The current Landmarks Preservation Commission, a majority of them new to the commission since my time, appointed by councilmembers who seldom all agree on anything, has now recommended unanimously that the council stop and think before adopting either draft. The commission recognizes that the changes proposed are extensive enough to warrant a full report, as prescribed by the California Environmental Quality Act, about what their impact will be on Berkeley’s threatened historic resources.  

Cool heads on the City Council, if there still are any, would be wise to ask for this report before voting, since it now seems very likely that if they skip this step there are citizens willing to back up the request for an EIR with legal muscle. It just doesn’t look good to substitute a shoddy draft produced in a few months by an uninformed Planning Commission for the product of years of work by commissioners chosen for their expertise in the field of protecting historic resources.  

 

B